Kingdom Hearts Alternate Scenarios
by NetOwl
Summary: Episode 1: The Hillbilly Particle Accelerator


Kingdom Hearts Alternate Scenarios

Episode 1

The Hillbilly Particle Accelerator

"What a jerk," Vexen muttered to himself as he slipped out the front door to the Superior's office and skulked back to his office, head angled down to his feet in the submissive pose of a defeated debator. Xemnas had needed mere seconds to dismantle his elaborately crafted argument, the one to which he had dedicated the majority of his free time for over a month. All of Vexen's legitimate scientific reasons for pursuing his next research project could not convince his boss that the object of study was more important than the fact that he had requested a few hundred billion Munny in research grants to fund the project, and Organization XIII's coffers were currently empty after Luxord's latest trip to Vegas and Demyx's standing order for his monthly supply of hair gel, which had to be shipped in the sorts of wooden crates normally used to transport tigers.

What all of this meant was that Vexen's search for the Higgs boson would have to wait until he could raise the money to build his own particle accelerator and hire a research team of people who could run the machine and take the appropriate data. That time would not come soon; he knew his future success depended on dislodging Luxord from the position as the Organization's treasurer, and to accomplish that he would need to demonstrate his competence with expensive equipment, experiment design, and data analysis, and then he would need to find someone with a Keyblade to forcibly remove Luxord from power to create a vacuum he (or an ally sympathetic to his goals) could fill.

This is why Vexen had a backup plan. Three days after the rejection of his grant proposal, he set it into motion.

Months earlier, he had discovered a long stretch of flat igneous rock running along the foot of one of the mountains on the same continent as Castle Oblivion. Using some of the dynamite Axel kept in his locker for reasons no one had any desire to know, Vexen had carved a groove into the rock just large enough for two adults to stand side by side and tall enough to reach up to their shoulders. The groove ran straight for a few hundred yards, and then it curved around the side of the mountain so that the beginning and the end of the path could not be seen at the same time by someone standing anywhere along the trench. This was the first step in Vexen's plan.

The second step was to install a thin metal rail along the floor and on the walls on either side for the purpose of guiding a vehicle along the path at high speeds, and the third step was to build an appropriate vehicle. The final design was a car with two egg shaped segments to its body. The front segment housed the engine and a pair of wheels for low speed propulsion, and the securely connected back segment would house a single passenger, strapped down tightly enough to restrict movement (e.g. movement out the side of the car, which at high enough speeds would be deadly) but with enough freedom to manipulate the car's controls, which were on the side of the passenger compartment. Steering would be handled by the extravehicular rails, to which the car secured itself through steel projections connected to spherical bearings. This way, the car would not edge too close to either wall, and the fasteners at the end of the arms would only twist the bearings, not the car itself, when the path curved.

The back of the rear segment held a second engine, to be engaged only when the gears on the front segment's combustion engine were disengaged, which would only happen at the high end of the range of the speeds that could be reached by the front segment's engine. The rear engine was not a combustion engine.

The final step in the plan was to prepare the launch team, and for this step, Xemnas had been more helpful than he was while listening to the more expensive grant proposal.

"You want me to help you?" Roxas asked Vexen, wide-eyed with shock at having been chosen for such a noble assignment so shortly after he had spent an hour being chewed out by the Superior for his failure to maintain proper decorum during the Organization's Halloween party. New to the group and still somewhat naïve, he had assumed that a Halloween party was a festive occasion, not a tactical exercise involving the invasion and overthrow of the government of the world of Halloween Town, and Xemnas had not been amused when, instead of destroying the world, Roxas had brought Jack Skellington a keg, a cooler of sea salt ice cream, and a karaoke machine and then partied like it was 1999 again.

"The suboptimal outcome of your expedition to Halloween Town has the Superior thinking that you need to further your education and experience in order to be an asset to Organization XIII. Therefore, as I am the most learned member of our group, I have been given charge of your further education, at least for today. As my attempts to gain funds for legitimate science failed, and as I do not actually have a degree in anything, you shall assist me in the testing of my new prototype tool for the advancement of Evil Mad Science."  
"That sounds pretty cool," said Roxas. "What do I need to do?"

"Just come with me," said Vexen, and the two of them walked to the mountainside.

At first Roxas could not see the point of being strapped into the passenger compartment of Vexen's car with so many layers of bandages that he could move only the tips of his fingers, but Vexen assured him that everything was designed for his safety. After all, a dead Roxas would be no good to him or to the ultimate goals of Organization XIII, so there was no such thing as excessive use of safety harnesses.

Although this did not quite convince Roxas, he did not argue.

With Roxas securely in the car, Vexen took a glance at his watch and then barked a few orders at Roxas, urging him to flip the switches located next to his fingers in a particular sequence, which he dictated and repeated until Roxas finally got everything right. When the last switch turned on, Vexen turned his gaze to his watch and silently counted. He was five minutes ahead of schedule.

Five minutes later, an indicator light on the car's dashboard came on, instructing Roxas to push with his left foot as hard as he could on a pedal located on the floor. Roxas did so, and the car began to move.

This did not scare Roxas. Cars moved, and he was in a car. Ergo, he should expect movement, most likely in the forward direction. What did scare him was that the car continued its acceleration long after he decided it should settle in at a healthy cruising speed, and all of his attempts at removing his foot from the pedal proved futile. The pedal was stuck to the floor, and his foot was stuck to the pedal!

Roxas struggled against his restraints, but he could make no headway, and the car sped along the rails, faster and faster, the front engine whining and straining. The car shook, the seat rattled, and the sound of metal scraping along the guiderails pierced his ears.

Then, with a pop, a hiss, and a clank, the gears connecting the engine to the wheels disconnected themselves, and the engine cooled to a halt. Roxas nearly had time to breathe a sigh of relief, but before he could detect any deceleration on the part of the vehicle, he heard a loud boom behind him, and the rocket engine kicked in.

It was a small rocket engine, burning fuel from a tank located partly behind and partly below the passenger compartment, but it was enough to push the payload of a small car and a single passenger forward at speeds that could not be reached by the engine in front of the car. Roxas could not tell just how fast he was going, but the loud sound of the burn behind his head told him that the worst was not over, and the g-forces shoving him back against his seat told him he was still accelerating.

Accelerating, and accelerating, and accelerating. It had never occurred to Roxas that there was a rocket on the back of the car, and it took him a minute to realize why. When he had arrived at the start of the track, the rocket had been hidden inside a section of the back wall of the trench, with the passenger component of the car backed up far enough that it was the first thing he could see when looking down into the trench from above. The rocket had been under his feet as he stood looking down at the car—Vexen had tricked him into climbing into something far more dangerous than he had let on!

Then came the next half of the trick, and Roxas never saw it coming.

Traveling well over a hundred miles per hour down a rocky trench carved out of the side of the mountain in a home-built rocket-propelled single passenger car, Roxas shot head on into Axel, who was also traveling well over a hundred miles per hour down a rocky trench carved out of the side of the mountain in a home-built rocket-propelled single passenger car but in the opposite direction. Neither Roxas nor Axel (complicit, in Xemnas's view, in the Halloween party failure) had time to notice who was in the other car before a spectacular collision between two huge high velocity payloads sent such a shockwave through the countryside that it caused Marluxia, over a mile away and near the top of Castle Oblivion, to slip while pruning his favorite indoor plant, Charlie, resulting in a spray of perfectly good leaves falling to the floor.

Vexen's field full of monitoring instruments took in all of the data he could have asked for during the collision, including the shaking of the ground, the loudness of the crash, and the maximum height at which pieces of debris had flown. All of this satisfied Vexen immensely. He would spend weeks analyzing the data he had obtained during the first run of his quaintly named Hillbilly Particle Accelerator, and by the time he could finish his analysis, Roxas and Axel would be recovered from the crash and ready for a second run.

Or maybe, just maybe, he could get Luxord into the machine, and he could use a bigger rocket.

Vexen smiled.


End file.
